The Crusades Actor Reg Pritchard Dies

Reg Pritchard, familiar to Doctor Who fans for his humorous, conniving performance as Bazaar Shopkeeper Ben Daheer in The Crusade, has passed away.

Reg, who was born in Wrexham in 1925, had a long and distinguished career starting in 1961, when he first appeared on our screens in Dixon of Dock Green. He then went on to feature in some of the most iconic programmes of that decade including The Avengers, The Saint, Sykes and Z- Cars.

Reg later returned to Doctor Who in the role of Man in Mackintosh in The Daleks’ Master Plan episode The Feast of Steven – leading to a great joke when much to the man’s confusion the Doctor sees him in the police station and remarks that he has met him ‘in a market place in Jaffa’.

Everyone has a favourite Doctor and mine - just for his honesty, his fairness and his ability to not notice the Master's awful, awful disguises/anagrams (Sir Gilles Estram!?!) - has to be the Fifth Doctor, Peter Davison. The stories didn’t serve him as well as his acting served those stories.